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Miki introduced this document in August 2012 in her post "The Long Arc of Commitment." As of January 2013, she is writing a series of posts on each commitment at the Metta Center's Nonviolence For Daily Living blog. In the introduction to the series, she writes:

Each entry in this series will introduce one of the commitments and offer a concrete practice to help integrate it into your life. At the end, a final entry will reflect on the paradoxes raised by having “commitments” and how we can create balance and softness in our lives at the same time as we maintain our central focus on nonviolence.

Core Commitments

RELATING TO MYSELF

1.Openness to
Myself: even when I act in ways I
really don’t like, I want to keep my heart open to myself. If I find myself in
self-judgment, I want to seek support to reconnect with myself and hold with
compassion the needs that motivate my actions.

2.Openness to the
Full Emotional Range: even when my
feelings are uncomfortable for me, I want to stay present with myself and keep
my heart open to the fullness of my emotional experience. If I find myself
contracting away from my experience, numb or shut down, I want to seek support
to release defendedness and open to what is.

3.Risking my
Significance: even when I am
full of doubt, I want to offer myself in full to the world. If I find myself
thinking that I am not important or that my actions are of no significance, I
want to seek support to come back to my knowledge that my presence and my gifts
matter.

4.Responsibility: even when overwhelmed with obstacles or difficult
emotions, I want to take full responsibility for my feelings, my actions, and my
life. If I find myself giving my power away to other people, larger forces, or
analytic categories such as my past or any labels I put on myself, I want to
seek support to find the core source of choice within me to live as I want and
ask for what I want.

5.Self-Care: even when I am stressed, overwhelmed, or in
disconnection, I want to maintain my commitments to my well-being, and take
actions that nourish my life. If I find myself letting go of strategies that I
know contribute to my life (such as exercise, eating as I want, receiving
support and empathy as needed, enjoyable activities, or anything else that I
know works for me), I want to seek support to ground myself in the preciousness
of my own life and my desire to nurture myself.

6.Balance: even when I am drawn to overstretching myself (including towards any of
these commitments), I want to remain attentive to the limits of my capacity in
any given moment. If I find myself pushing myself, I want to seek support to
honor the natural wisdom of my organism and to trust that remaining within my
current limits will support me in increasing my capacity over time.

ORIENTING TOWARDS OTHERS

7.Loving
No Matter What:
even when my needs are seriously unmet, I want to keep my heart open. If I find
myself generating judgments, angry, or otherwise triggered, I want to seek
support in transforming my judgments and meeting others with love.

8.Assumption
of Innocence:
even when others’ actions or words make no sense to me or frighten me, I want
to assume a need-based human intention behind them. If I find myself
attributing ulterior motives or analyzing others’ actions, I want to seek
support to ground myself in the clarity that every human action is an attempt
to meet needs no different from my own.

9.Empathic Presence: even when others are in pain, disconnected from
themselves, expressing intensity, or in judgment, I want to maintain a relaxed
presence with their experience. If I find myself attempting to fix, offering
advice, doing mechanical empathy, or turning my attention elsewhere, I want to
seek support to regain my faith in the transformative power and the gift of
just being with another.

10.Generosity: even when I am afraid or low-resourced, I want to
keep reaching out to offer myself to others and respond to requests. If I find
myself contracting in fear and unwilling to give, I want to seek support to
release any thoughts of scarcity and embrace opportunities to give.

INTERACTING WITH OTHERS

11.Authenticity
and Vulnerability: even when
I feel scared and unsure of myself, I want to share the truth that lives in me
with others while maintaining care and compassion for others and for myself. If
I find myself hiding or protecting, I want to seek support to embrace the
opportunity to expand my sense of self and transcend shame.

12.Availability
for Feedback: even when I
want to be seen and accepted, I want to make myself available to receive
feedback from others in order to learn and grow. If I find myself being
defensive or slipping into self-judgments, I want to seek support to find the
beauty and gift in what is being shared with me.

13.Openness to Dialogue: even when I am very attached to a particular outcome, I
want to remain open to shifting through dialogue. If I find myself defending a
position or arguing someone else out of their position I want to seek support
to release the attachment, connect with my needs and the needs of others, and
aim for mutually supportive strategies to emerge out of connection with needs.

14.Resolving Conflicts: even when I have many obstacles to connecting with
someone, I want to make myself available to work out issues between us with
support from others. If I find myself giving up on someone, I want to seek
support to remember the magic of dialogue and entrust myself to the process of
healing and reconciliation to restore connection.

RELATING TO LIFE

15.Interdependence: even when I
experience separation or deep isolation, I want to open my heart to the
fullness of the interconnectedness of all life and to cultivate awareness of
the countless ways that our actions and experiences affect each other. If I
find myself retreating into self-sufficiency, separation, or mistrust in my own
gifts or those of others, I want to seek support to remember the beauty and
relief of resting in interdependence, including the many ways each of our lives
depends on the gifts, actions, and efforts of others.

16.Accepting What Is: even when change happens (welcome or unwelcome, small or
large), things fall apart, people don’t come through, or calamities take place
in the world, I want to remain open to life. If I find myself contracting away
from life or drawn to ideas about what should happen, I want to seek support to
find a sense of peace with unmet needs, and to choose responses and actions
from clarity about how I want to interact with and respond to life.

17.Celebration of Life: even when I am faced with
difficulties, personal, interpersonal, or global, I want to maintain an
attitude of appreciation and gratitude for what life brings me. If I find
myself becoming cynical or experiencing only pain and despair, I want to seek
support to connect my heart with the beauty and wonder that exists in life even
in the most dire circumstances.

I see a need here especially in the part "Relating to Life" to "encourage" or challenge or??people to activism. There are many situations in our world that need effort for change. To have a commitment to working on one of these, it seems to me would be part of interconnnectedness. Then maybe there need to be thoughts on "my need," others' needs, etc. in the activism.

Thank you for these commitments. I trip over the use of the words "want to" and suggest that they be removed. When we "want to" do something, I believe that we actually set ourselves up not to achieve it, because in 'wanting' it, we are defining it as out of reach/ lacking or 'wanting' in our lives. It might sound like semantic nit-picking, but I think it very powerful :-)These commitments are beautiful; I think they read more strongly when we use them as a definitive statement.With love and gratitude, Wendy

Wendy, That's a really interesting comment. Miki asked me to find the paragraphs she wrote a while back about why she used the word "want." Here they are:

"I have not found a word that captures the exact meaning that I am looking for. Commitment may be a bit too strong, and tends to connote “should,” thus invoking the non-choiceful energy of obligation and duty. “Intention” is not strong enough, in my mind, to carry the unwavering force of staying the course even when the going gets hard. Somewhere I also want to capture the unpredictability of life. These commitments are not a promise, which none of us can give. I have full understanding of how challenging life is, and imagine that no matter how strong the choice, every single one of us at some point or another will not find sufficient inner resources to follow through on these.

"In order to soften the intensity of “commitment” without losing the strength, I chose to use the word “want” rather than “commit” in the actual wording of the commitments. Another reason is that I want the words to remind any of us who makes the choice to follow this path of the overarching clarity that this is what we want, that there is no in-principle objection to living life in this way, no matter what anyone else is doing, no matter what the structures of the world look like, no matter what the circumstances are.

"This is a tall order. This, to me, is a mobilized life. The commitments serve as a compass, a reminder, a scaffolding that can hold us in living by choice."

Maybe your and some other people's choice will be to revise the wording to take out the "wants" while others will like Miki's reasoning and keep it in.

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Other Postings by Miki Kashtan

From Miki's Metta Center blog

Empathic Presence: even when others are in pain, disconnected from themselves, expressing intensity, or in judgment, I want to maintain a relaxed presence with their experience. If I find myself attempting to fix, offering advice, or turning my attention elsewhere, I want to seek support to regain my faith in the transformative power and the gift of just being with another.